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Ethics and Tech Entrepreneurship: Why ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Isn’t Good Enough

November 3, 2020/0 Comments/in Tips /by Dani Ryskamp

For many years, ethics was a background question in tech, if it came up at all. Software developers and tech entrepreneurs focused on solving engineering or coding problems, creating functional solutions to the problems stated in project specifications.

Solving the problem at hand was the goal. Concerns about the ethical implications of the solution were academic at best.

That landscape is changing, however. In the past few years, “tech coverage has grown more skeptical, investigative, and serious — a shift from treating Silicon Valley as a novelty to seeing it as the power center it has become,” Anna Wiener writes at The New Yorker.

Since Wiener wrote those words, two other important developments have altered the landscape further: A global pandemic that’s forced millions of people to embrace remote work, and an antitrust lawsuit that the U.S. government has filed against Google.

Amid all these shifts is an increasing demand for tech companies to consider the ethical implications of their offerings and to take responsibility for missteps.

Here’s the thing: Many tech companies have operated for years on ethical systems that aren’t sufficiently developed to address the myriad roles technology plays in our lives.

‘Don’t Be Evil’ =/= ‘Do Good’

Central to the issue of ethics in tech entrepreneurship is the question “What makes software good?”

To a developer or a tech startup, good software is seamless, efficient and intuitive for users. Yet software that meets these conditions, while good to its creators, may not do good for its users, Wiener writes.

Individual software developers may see problems as they arise, but developers don’t have many sources of guidance outside the direction given by the tech companies they serve.

And the guidance given by tech companies can be questionable at best. For instance, Google’s now-famous ethical guideline, “Don’t Be Evil,” ran into trouble almost immediately upon its inclusion in the company’s 2004 prospectus.

While the company clearly had high hopes for maintaining its ethical purity, “the problem was that purity requires a business model to support it and in 2000 the venture capitalists who had invested in Google pointed out to [Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders] that they didn’t have one,” John Naughton writes in The Guardian.

Google’s response — to sell advertising based on aggregated user data — raises ethics concerns of its own. It’s unclear whether targeted advertising helps customers or companies, but it has spurred a race to acquire user data, which may then be used for nefarious purposes, David Dayen in The New Republic writes.

Ultimately, Google hasn’t even been able to cling to its goal of avoiding evil, says Ross LaJeunesse, Google’s former head of international relations. LaJeunesse left the company in 2019 after 11 years at Google, citing concerns about the company’s willingness to cooperate with censorship demands in China and his suspicions that Google was actively pursuing deals with the Saudi government.

Before leaving, LaJeunesse says, he pushed for a company-wide Human Rights Program that would give the company’s teams more ethical guidance than “don’t be evil.” Every attempt to launch the program, however, was met with resistance.

“I then realized that the company had never intended to incorporate human rights principles into its business and product decisions,” he writes. “Just when Google needed to double down on a commitment to human rights, it decided to instead chase bigger profits and an even higher stock price.”

Compliant =/= Good, Either

It’s worth talking about the Google antitrust suit here.

The U.S. Department of Justice, in its suit, alleges that Google acts as “the gatekeeper of the Internet.”

“Google was accused in the long-expected lawsuit of harming competition in internet search and search advertising through distribution agreements – contracts in which Google pays other companies millions of dollars to prioritize its search engine in their products – and other restrictions that put its search tool front and center whenever consumers browsed the web,” Guardian reporter Kari Paul writes.

Whatever the outcome of that suit, it’s important to remember that even if the U.S. government compels Google or any other tech company into a less-monopolistic position, that doesn’t wipe the slate clean or hold that company accountable for its previous ethical breaches.

Attempts to Codify ‘Good’ in Software Development

Some efforts have been made to provide ethical guidance for developers within the professional field, rather than leaving developers to the whims of individual employers.

For instance, the International Standard for Professional Software Development and Ethical Responsibility, promulgated by IEEE-CS/ACM, recognizes that “software engineers have significant opportunities to do good or cause harm, to enable others to do good or cause harm, or to influence others to do good or cause harm.”

The document attempts to give broad guidance in eight areas, though it acknowledges that it can only provide guidance in the abstract.

To solve tech’s ethics problems, however, ethics boards and advisory documents won’t be enough, says Andrew Maynard, director of the Arizona State University Risk Innovation Lab: “Businesses also need to focus on outcomes, the often tortuous pathway between aspirational goals and what happens when the rubber hits the road.”

When businesses fail to consider outcomes broadly, nightmare scenarios can result.

A Superhuman Error

In 2019, startup Superhuman made headlines when tech executive Mike Davidson discovered a concerning feature in the company’s email software: the use of embedded pixels to track whether, when and where recipients opened their emails. The feature ran by default, and recipients of emails from a Superhuman inbox could not opt out of telegraphing this information to the email’s sender.

Davidson emphasized the privacy and security concerns this feature created: “Ask yourself if you expect this information to be collected on you and relayed back to your parent, your child, your spouse, a co-worker, a salesperson, an ex, a random stranger, or a stalker every time you read your email.”

How did this feature make it into the hands of consumers? In short: Failure to consider the ethical implications of read receipts from multiple perspectives.

“I have come to understand that there are indeed nightmare scenarios involving location tracking,” says Rahul Vohra, founder and CEO of Superhuman. “… When we built Superhuman, we focused only on the needs of our customers. We did not consider potential bad actors.”

Little Decisions, Big Impacts

Even small decisions matter when it comes to building a company’s ethics, Davidson says. Those small decisions accrete over time, becoming habits that define the way a company does business.

Distributed to enough customers, those small decisions begin to change the way customers think, as well. Customers who see unethical or questionable features in software may assume that the feature is legal (or it wouldn’t be present). They may also fail to consider whether the feature’s uses are ethical, says Davidson.

Features that do an end-run around privacy or security concerns, for instance, may cause customers to skip the ethics question entirely if the features are presented as defaults. These customers don’t think, “Wait, should I use these?” when read receipts are presented as a default or when opt-out functions aren’t included.

“Superhuman teaches its user to surveil by default,” Davidson writes. “I imagine many users sign up for this, see the feature, and say to themselves ‘Cool! Read receipts! I guess that’s one of the things my $30 a month buys me.’”

Building an Ethical Future for Tech Entrepreneurship

Corporate ethics matter to today’s job-seekers. Increasingly, they matter to customers, as well.

Tech startups and other businesses find themselves held to standards regarding fair dealing, sustainability, data security, privacy, diversity and inclusion, Larry Alton at Forbes writes. Tech companies can no longer let these issues slide past, or hope that a pat answer like “Don’t be evil” will account for them effectively.

“At first sight, it is easy to think that the technical part of development is not directly related to people’s lives,” Daniel Alcanja writes at Simple Programmer. “After all, it is the business practices that really affect users.”

Since software developers are the ones closest to software’s creation and functionality, however, developers know the software best. Thus, developers are uniquely positioned to address key ethical concerns — which means they also have an ethical responsibility to do so, says Alcanja.

But what exactly does that ethical responsibility entail?

“The difference between what you, as a software developer, can do legally, a floor, and what you should do, a ceiling, is often vast, confusing, and not always intuitive,” Olga V. Mack writes at VentureBeat.

The problem is the companies these developers work for can be the source of unethical demands rather than a source of guidance regarding the proper course of action. Further, it’s not the job of individual coders to be responsible for upholding company ethics. That’s labor that requires the buy-in and efforts of people much higher up the chain of command.

There are people and organizations trying to push the tech sector in the right direction. For example, Ethics in Entrepreneurship, founded by Theranos whistleblower Erika Cheung, is working to build and nurture stronger ethical foundations across the tech sector.

Internally, managers and executives need their own sources of ethical guidance, as do the companies they work for — and the investors those companies are beholden to.

That’s a decades-long project. As a starting point, SAP’s Max Wessel and Nicole Helmer propose a three-point framework for companies to guide their innovations toward more ethical outcomes:

Assume your innovation becomes the standard bearer. “Assume you become dominant,” Wessel and Helmer write. “Then ask what is most likely to break, what can be done to prevent breaks, and how to handle them when they occur.”
Identify and document the safeguards present in the market your innovation disrupts, then imagine how the efficiencies your product has created could be used to circumvent those safeguards were your tech to fall into careless hands. As an example, think about Airbnb and its house-party problem.
Clearly and explicitly define what people or teams are responsible for re-introducing those safeguards.

As Wessel and Helmer put it, this is a path toward both tech success and “[taking] responsibility for the future that will be created” when you achieve that success.

Images by: Peter G., Katarzyna Bialasiewicz/©123RF.com, scyther5/©123RF.com

Empathy Mapping in Marketing: 4 Steps to Success

October 20, 2020/0 Comments/in Resources, Tips /by Ed Currington

Empathy maps are often underused by marketers. In a discipline where success depends on being able to appeal to your customers’ needs, wants and desires, marketing departments should be doing all they can to get inside the heads of consumers. Most create customer personas. Few go any further.

Empathy maps are what make customer profiles feel genuinely human.

Ready to begin? Start by reading our introduction to empathy mapping if you haven’t already. Then, read on to find out how your marketing team can level up its efforts with empathy mapping.

Extract As Much As You Can From Your Mapping Session

It’s best to start with a team-wide brainstorm if you want to get the most from your efforts. Sure, you can do it alone, but you’ll miss insights from other team members and the ideas that only come from a lively debate.

Lindsay Munro, a social strategist at Adobe, recommends team members write their comments individually, but discuss them out loud with the rest of the group as they had them to the map. “By asking questions, it’s possible to reach more profound insights — such as why team members really think the way they do — which can be valuable for the rest of the team,” she writes.

But why not go even further and ask the opinions of other departments? After all, you’re not the only team that thinks about or speaks to customers.

Each department sees the customer from a different angle, writes Nick Nelson, content marketing manager at TopRank Marketing. It’s only by coordinating with other departments that you can turn disparate information into a meaningful picture.

By working across the company, you’ll pull useful information out of department siloes, says Jonathon Hensley, co-founder and CEO at Emerge Interactive. Certain insights might be unique to a certain point in the customer journey, but that doesn’t mean they won’t prove valuable to marketing efforts.

Further, don’t be afraid to shape the map to your specific needs. The template empathy maps that you can find online are a great place to start, but the quadrants may not fit your needs, says the team at NX Creative. They offer one four-quadrant version of the map that contains a section for pain points, a section for goals and a section for benefits.

You needn’t worry about messing it up, either. There’s plenty of time to check and refine your map. In fact, Causevox’s Rob Wu recommends testing whether your map accurately reflects your real customers as soon as you’ve finished creating it. Interviewing a cross-section of customers is a great way to see whether you’ve hit the key points.

Remember, you can always adjust your map if needed.

Use Your Map to Add Depth to Customer Personas

There’s a problem with traditional customer personas.

They typically lack empathy, says Katie McKenna, director of content at Portent. “Companies using personas to craft marketing and sales tactics develop a clearer understanding of their buyers, but this method can backfire,” she writes. “Even small audiences contain vastly different individuals, and traditional personas don’t embrace every person in that sampling.”

The beauty of empathy mapping is that it allows you to take your customer personas even further — essentially turning them from 2D pictures to 3D sculptures.

Where customer profiles are focused on the superficial, empathy mapping goes deeper, writes Advanced Web Ranking’s Lia Boangiu. “An empathy map goes beyond the interests, skills, or lifestyle of your customers, and into what they see, feel and think – allowing you to gain a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be them,” she says.

Combine them, and you’ll have customer personas that begin to resemble genuine human customers, not faceless data points.

Apply Your Empathy Map Across All Marketing Efforts

With a better understanding of your customers and what their pain points are, you can create content that helps customers overcome those hurdles, says Serenity Gibbons, writer and former assistant editor at The Wall Street Journal.

Don’t stop there, though. Seek customer feedback to understand whether your content marketing really is striking that empathetic note. Gibbons recommends surveying your audience to see whether your content is helpful and whether they’ve bought from you as a result of that content.

The more you use your empathy map to tell a story, the more successful you’ll be, says Big Leap’s Stephen Porritt. When you understand what customers want to hear, creating engaging content gets that much easier — so long as you continue to speak to the reader’s needs.

Revisit Your Empathy Map in the Future

Your empathy map is only useful if you continue to refer to it every time you write a blog post or launch a new campaign. UX and content strategist Jennifer Leigh Brown recommends hanging your map in a public spot or designing a poster around it

Alternatively, Demian Farnworth at Copyblogger recommends turning your map into a shareable document if you work remotely (or if there’s nowhere good to hang it).

Wherever you put your empathy map, make sure to keep returning to it and updating it in the future. As products change and consumers change, your empathy map will need to change with them. That’s how you continue to add value to your marketing efforts.

Images by: You X Ventures, Headway, Green Chameleon

Empathy Mapping 101: Improve Your Content Through Understanding

October 6, 2020/0 Comments/in Resources, Tips /by Amanda Dodge

Assumptions are one of the biggest risks you can take in the marketing world. You assume you understand what your customers want. You assume you know the problems facing an industry. You assume customers are willing to pay for a service.

Often, these assumptions are based on information, but this data or personal experience is flawed. It either doesn’t paint a complete picture of the situation (like zooming in on the nose of the Mona Lisa), or it skews the correct view like a prized Picasso.

The process of empathy mapping was created to provide detailed and accurate descriptions of audiences to better help designers and developers create useful products. Over the years, its use has expanded across several industries and disciplines.

What Exactly Is Empathy Mapping?

Empathy mapping uses a set template and brainstorming sessions to answer questions about a specific audience.

In marketing, the goal of these maps is to highlight flaws in logic and missing pieces of customer information.

“By making the map visual and directing the inquiry at a specific target we are able to build a much better picture of our market,” says Charles Leon, designer and keynote speaker. “It’s often the case that these kinds of maps can reveal where we have gaps in our existing data and where we have made assumptions.”

Leon shares examples of one of his empathy maps and walks readers through his process of developing and improving them. One aspect is clear: The map is a living representation of the audience. It’s constantly edited, updated and improved upon with more detailed or more accurate information.

Dave Gray, author of books like “The Connected Company” and founder of XPLANE, was the original developer of the empathy map. Gray most recently updated the process of map creation in 2017 as a way to centralize the design of the map and ensure that the creations of others don’t degrade the original concept. This most recent version incorporates goals into the map, which helps users understand what a given audience could be working toward.

What Are the Benefits of Empathy Mapping?

There are multiple benefits of sitting down with your team, stakeholders, and vendors to map out the needs and experiences of your target audience.

The first benefit is that it forces everyone involved to focus and plan instead of diving right in. “There’s a chance that different stakeholders might jump immediately into what they want out of the product, or they might immediately start talking about constraints, or you might start talking about timelines,” says Jon Tinman, user experience designer at Fuzzy Math.

“Doing this empathy map as early as possible in the process is the best way to have everybody stop, take a moment and really think about the person you’re designing for.”

Even if you think your whole team is on the same page and understands the goals of a campaign or project, creating an empathy map can provide a written, visual guide that team members can return to during the whole process. This is why empathy maps are typically developed before any concepts are even considered.

“Empathy maps are most useful at the beginning of the design process after user research but before requirements and concepting,” writes Jennifer Leigh Brown, SVP and marketing communications director at Fulton Bank. “The mapping process can help synthesize research observations and reveal deeper insights about a user’s needs.”

Empathy mapping can be used to create audience personas or create a bridge between existing personas and product solutions.

What Does an Empathy Map Look Like?

While Gray developed a template for an empathy map, you can adjust your mapping for your business or industry.

Connie Malamed, keynote speaker and author of “Visual Design Solutions,” notes that you will find different versions of empathy maps across the web. However, there is a commonly used template that utilizes multiple rectangles (instead of the original triangles) to take notes.

There are four quadrants in the main box for what the customer says, thinks, feels and does. Then, in the lower box, there is room for insights and conclusions. This lower box might have different criteria, like “Pains and Gains,” or frustrations and aspirations to better paint a picture of their motives.

To get a better idea of what goes into each box, Sarah Gibbons, chief designer at Nielsen Norman Group, went into detail for what each of the four quadrants means:

Says: This refers to words and phrases someone says out loud, either from a media quote, a direct interview or a comment in a focus group.
Thinks: This section covers what the user experiences internally throughout the experience. This may be the same as what they say, but audiences often have thoughts they aren’t willing to vocalize, especially around more sensitive subjects.
Does: What actions does the user take? How do they take these steps?
Feels: How does the user feel about the experience? What worries them or excites them?

In Gray’s most recent empathy map design, he moved the Think and Feels sections into the head of the user — almost within the same quadrant. The goal is to differentiate what designers actually know based on actions and quotes rather than internal thoughts and feelings, which may be assumed or are less concrete.

This empathy map can be filled out individually (by one person at their desk) or as a group. However, the map needs to be completed objectively. Lindsay Munro, a social strategist at Adobe, emphasizes the importance of having a moderator at the brainstorming session. This person will help team members fill in gaps and provide an unbiased view of the target audience.

The moderator:

Doesn’t ask leading questions that will frame how people think about the subject or the problems at hand.
Doesn’t express their own opinions and controls their reactions.
Makes sure everyone participates.

This objectivity is essential because you (and other stakeholders) will be tempted to add your own beliefs or wishes to the customer experience. This is natural and will occur throughout the whole development process.

“Taking an active view from the user’s perspective takes tons of practice and consideration,” says Camren Browne, UX/UI tutor at CareerFoundry. “While empathy mapping is a cost-effective and easily transmittable way to create for and cater to the user, it cannot stand alone.”

Design teams need to use multiple user-centric tools, along with empathy maps, to make sure the target audience or customer stays at the center of the design process and that the customer view doesn’t get skewed or manipulated.

Empathy Mapping Outside of Programming and Design

Empathy mapping has long since left the worlds of design and development. While it is still used in those fields, these maps can be found across many industries and have multiple benefits.

One example is in human resources, whose teams look to improve the employee experience and streamline hiring. “Companies already develop customer personas as part of their marketing plans,” writes Sharlyn Lauby, the HR Bartender.

“And HR departments create candidate personas as part of their talent acquisition strategy. Why not create an employee persona to help with the development of the employee experience?”

In journalism, empathy maps help reporters tell better stories by giving them more information and helping them understand the full scope of a story. This prevents tunnel vision in reporting or coming to the wrong conclusions based solely on the data provided.

“It is often [smaller] stories which lead us to the bigger ones — partly because they enhance your understanding of the field, but perhaps more because they build relationships and contacts, and create a profile and reputation for covering this subject which may lead people to seek you out with more stories,” writes Paul Bradshaw, data journalist and author of the Online Journalism Blog.

Empathy mapping as a cross-disciplinary tool has become popular because it forces people to check their beliefs at the door. It creates a safe space for executives and employees to admit that they don’t know everything.

“It’s hard for internal stakeholders of a company to understand the motives of external stakeholders, such as customers,” Swetha Amaresan, social media page for NBCUniversal, writes at HubSpot. “You may be able to make some assumptions, but to get the facts, you have to ask.”

By admitting that your assumptions aren’t backed up by evidence or facts, you can then take steps to fill in those gaps.

Empathy Mapping in Content Marketing

Empathy mapping is gaining traction in the worlds of marketing and communication, especially as companies grapple with the sheer amount of data they have and wonder how to use it.

“As a content strategist, I’ve witnessed our clients become increasingly obsessed with data,” writes Joe Lazauskas, head of marketing at Contently. “… I fail to hear anyone talk about one of the most fundamental aspects of marketing: talking to your customers.”

Empathy maps help teams step back and consider customers as real people with actual worries and pain points, not just data points that need to be optimized for.

“Learning more about the emotional needs of the customer will help you deliver better content to them,” says Catherine Goulbourne, senior content manager at Oban International, says. “You’ll be producing content that addresses their fundamental concerns and needs. This helps to cement brand trust from a customer point of view and will help your brand/website gain influence and praise in the long run.”

Empathy maps have also become popular as customer journeys become more complex. Few sales funnels are linear, and many are difficult to map. That’s simply human nature.

“Human life is rife with examples of cognitive dissonance that make little sense if you think purchase decisions follow the 19th century buyer funnel of attention-interest-desire-action,” says Linda Emma, director of marketing at CloudControlMedia, LLC. “They don’t. Which is all the more reason to really understand what might motivate your users.”

This mapping also pulls marketers away from limited buyer personas, which can box in customers or limit the buyers whom companies market to.

“One of the most common mistakes when developing audience personas is only focusing on the ideal customer/user,” says Jonathon Hensley, cofounder and CEO at Emerge Interactive. “While this individual is important, they rarely capture the full depth and nuance of your target market, the different contexts and varying situations that they’re living.”

Empathy mapping doesn’t replace sales funnels or audience personas. Instead, it provides assistance to make both more valuable. Sales and marketing teams can avoid tunnel vision by approaching audiences with knowledge and empathy, not just a few data points and end goals.

Empathy mapping can be as useful as you make it. If your maps are filled with assumptions and your brainstorming meetings are done in a rush, then they will be incomplete, flawed and unusable. However, if you take the time to treat your customers like individual human beings, you will have more success with this tool.

Images by: Wavebreak Media Ltd/©123RF.com, Aleksandr Davydov/©123RF.com, sanuas

Over Reliance on Bad Analytics Sours Your Content Marketing

September 8, 2020/0 Comments/in Resources, SEO, Tips /by Ed Currington

It is notoriously difficult to measure the success of content marketing, much more so than other forms of marketing.

This is true for a number of reasons, writes Divvy’s Brody Dorland. For one, content marketing campaigns tend to last longer than other marketing campaigns. It’s also harder to attribute success to your content than it is to a paid search campaign, for instance.

Further, the customer journey is far from straightforward. Users may read several pieces of content and see several ads before they convert.

When content marketers do try to quantify their success, their data is often found wanting. Analytics platforms aren’t perfect. Sometimes, the data is flat-out wrong; other times the best metrics are hidden or not available.

Either way, bad data leads to bad decisions that can hamstring your content marketing efforts.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In this post, we’ll highlight the common pitfalls of using analytics to inform content marketing decisions and show you a smarter way of using data to inform your strategy.

Most Analytics Platforms Are Limited — And Some Are Wrong

Google Analytics is a pretty comprehensive platform that can give you some valuable insights. But it isn’t perfect.

As Hinge’s Kevin Bloom points out, it’s easy to make mistakes using the platform. When errors do occur, they often throw your data completely out of whack. “I don’t mean a few extra sessions or a bounce rate that is off a bit,” Bloom writes. “I mean traffic numbers that are double what they should be and time on site and average pages per visit that are half of what they should be.”

Bot traffic can also be a big problem, writes the team at DataDome. Currently, bots account for around half of all web traffic. Most aren’t blocked by tools like Google Analytics, either, which means much of the data you are using could be skewed.

Even some of the metrics they provide can be misleading. Take bounce rate, for example. This is the percentage of users who leave your website having only viewed one page. Digital marketer Jeff Sauer says bounce rate doesn’t tell a complete story. It doesn’t tell you how much time a user spent on that page, for instance, or whether they got what they needed from the one page they landed on.

Bounce rate often gets framed as a negative when it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The Most Important Metrics Usually Aren’t Tracked or Aren’t Obvious

Google Analytics has a lot of inherent issues when it comes to measuring the success of your content, writes digital marketing consultant Gabrielle Sadeh. This is particularly true for B2B content marketers.

“Analytics was built to track traffic for ecommerce and content sites, with the structure of its reports built around pageviews,” Sadeh writes. “It can provide some sophisticated data around those views – what kinds of audience members are behind them, how they might have arrived, what they did next, and other such questions – but today’s content marketers need the ability to measure and understand much more than that.”

The platform is great at giving marketers a birds-eye view of content performance, writes CRO strategist Mark D. Hall. But it doesn’t help you understand why a piece of content is performing better than another or how it contributes to business revenue.

That’s because the focus is on metrics that are easy to track and understand, not the more complicated, valuable metrics that require a bit of work to calculate.

The most important metrics — e.g. conversion rates per traffic source, organic traffic to key pages, qualified leads, net promoter score — are often the hardest to track, says Orbit Media’s Andy Crestodina. “This is what most people don’t realize about content metrics: The most visible the metric, the less important it is to the bottom line. And the less visible/easy to find, the more important it is.”

Unfortunately, many content marketers get sucked into those low-hanging-fruit metrics, and those can tell a pretty optimistic story. A specific article might get thousands of shares or Likes, for example, and that will give any content creator a little rush of dopamine.

But those are vanity metrics. They look good but don’t tell you anything important.

They’re also great at placating a boss or a client, which is where a lot of the problem with bad analytics lies. Marketing Insider Group CEO Michael Brenner notes just how much sheer pressure is on some content marketers to use vanity metrics as a result. If you need to demonstrate the value of your content, it’s easy to use impressive engagement metrics rather than more insightful alternatives.

Ankit Prakash, the marketing lead at Aritic, says in his experience the vast majority of content marketers focus on engagement metrics like page views, bounce rate and view time at the expense of more important metrics relating to sales or lead generation.

Bad Data Leads to Bad Decisions

Most marketers understand the powerful role data can play in improving their efforts. When it comes to content marketing, data can be used to help content creators target a specific audience and get more engagement, marketing speaker and trainer Michael Leander writes.

But data is only beneficial if you’re using the right metrics. “The quality of your marketing efforts depends on the quality of the data being managed and studied,” writes George Deeb, a managing partner at Red Rocket Ventures.

The metrics you use must be aligned to business goals, advises Gain CEO Albizu Garcia. If you’re looking at the wrong metrics, you aren’t going to improve your content in the right way.

This is exactly what happens when you rely on vanity metrics and inaccurate data.

Relying on such metrics can cause you to waste time and effort by focusing on the wrong areas, writes Brafton’s Jeff Baker. He uses bounce rates as an example: A page with an 86 percent bounce rate but a conversion rate of 2.3 percent is performing much better than a page with a significantly lower bounce rate of 53 percent but a conversion rate of less than 1 percent.

Vanity metrics won’t help you to improve your content, either, writes SEO strategist Jessica Greene. You simply don’t get the level of detail you need to identify the type of content that works best, the optimum channels for distributing that content or how you can create more value.

A Smarter Way to Using Analytics to Improve Your Content Marketing

If you’re serious about accurately measuring the success of your content and using data to improve your strategy, then ditch the vanity metrics in favor of the strategies below:

1. Clarify Your Content Marketing Goals

Content marketing can be used to meet almost any business goal, writes Element Three’s Mollie Kuramoto. “The important thing is to set a goal for your content that makes sense to larger business objectives and then measure it.”

2. Identify Metrics That Measure Progress Toward Those Goals

Once you’ve identified that goal you can choose much more accurate metrics to measure. If you are using content marketing to drive revenue, then focus on lead quality and sales, writes OptinMonster’s Jacinda Santora. You can track a range of on-site actions like whether a user downloads your lead magnet or checks out your pricing page to determine how good a lead they are.

You don’t have to get rid of Google Analytics to do this, either. Freelance writer Elise Dopson demonstrates how you can eCommerce reporting to track the digital revenue your content generates.

3. Track Only a Handful of Metrics

Be careful not to go overboard with metrics, though, warns the team at Quicksprout. The more metrics you have, the harder it will be to demonstrate clear value. “Instead, aim to have as few metrics—that give you actionable, accurate information—as possible, and base your decisions on those.”

Vanity metrics are great to show off, but they don’t demonstrate real value. Using them to guide your content marketing efforts is as foolish as shouting about them in the first place. Instead, dig deeper into the numbers to prove whether your content marketing works. That’s how you get the actionable insights you need.

Images by: Lukas Blazek, JESHOOTS.COM, Daria Nepriakhina

4 Content Marketing Strategies to Promote Your New SaaS Product

July 7, 2020/0 Comments/in Tips /by Ed Currington

Content marketing is a fantastic SaaS marketing strategy. It’s effective whether you’re a startup with a small budget or an enterprise company using advanced strategies.

In particular, content marketing offers significant value for brands launching new products or features. At every stage of your promotional strategy and at every stage of your customer acquisition funnel, content marketing can be used to boost the success of your product launch.

Here are four ways to pair content marketing with your product launch strategy.

Drive Search Traffic With SEO-Focused Content

Content marketing typically works hand-in-hand with SEO. So, it would be natural to start promoting your new product or feature through keyword-focused content marketing. Both the product page and supporting blog material should be carefully targeted at high traffic, relevant keywords.

The compounding effect of SEO is what makes content marketing so powerful, writes Automation Anywhere’s Ben Cotton. The value of the content you create is only going to increase as time passes. This makes it much more effective than PPC advertising, for example, which only provides value while you’re spending money.

Just be sure you don’t try to hard-sell your product through blog posts, as marketing and blogging coach Jessica Thiefels points out. Instead, offer high-quality, helpful advice around specific topics. Only mention your product when relevant or through a call-to-action at the bottom of the post.

Focus exclusively on keywords that center around your core product, writes Kevin Indig, VP of SEO and content at G2. This won’t just make it easy to write the content; it will guarantee that the traffic you get from Google will be high-quality and potentially high-converting.

SaaS marketer Sujan Patel recommends brands focus on keywords that have commercial intent and that tie in with customer pain points. Consider what the searcher wants to find from their query and what Google currently displays. Then, create content that delivers on that need. When you reach people who know they have a problem, and know it’s a problem your product solves, it becomes much easier to convert them.

Build Hype Ahead of Launch With Teaser Content

Press releases are important, but your blog can be just as good at building product awareness.

People get so caught up in innovative marketing strategies they forget about basic strategies like blogging, writes John Lincoln, CEO of Ignite Visibility, who recommends blogging “at least once a week.”

This is exactly what HubSpot does ahead of a new product launch, notes HubSpot VP of Marketing Meghan Keaney Anderson. In the weeks leading up to a launch date, HubSpot publishes a series of articles around the new feature’s topic. This gets their audience thinking about related marketing strategies and primes them to look for a tool that can improve their results.

Constantly communicating your new product or features through your blog and email channels can even help you steal customers from competitors, writes Daniil Kopilevych, growth marketing manager at HelpCrunch. By notifying both potential and current users about a new product or new features, you make sure you “stay on top of your competitors’ users’ minds.”

Stand Apart From the Competition With Comparisons and Reviews

Speaking of stealing customers, part of your content marketing strategy should focus on differentiating your product and winning users from rivals.

Comparison posts are a great way to position your product, highlight differences between you and the competition, and build trust with potential customers, writes Lean Lab’s Melissa Randall. Honesty and impartiality (at least as much as possible) are key if you want to be considered “a trusted advisor,” she adds.

This kind of content is ripe for paid and organic search marketing, writes marketing strategist Jonathan Bentz. “Having pages like this built on your site will also allow you to rank and run advertising campaigns for keywords centered around alternatives to your competitor…and take top positions for searches that include the word “versus” in their query,” he says.

Sell and Retain With Content That Makes a Business Case

Soft-selling your product is important when targeting high-traffic keywords. But a slightly more direct approach can pay dividends, too, particularly when converting users from free to paid subscriptions (and making sure paid users stick around).

Creating how-to content centered around your product is a great way to show businesses how they can maximize the ROI of their investment in your product, writes B2B marketer Elise Dopson. This is especially true for products with multiple features. Many businesses might purchase your product for one specific feature. Showing them what else your product can do will help drive retention rates.

You don’t have to stick to the written word for this kind of content, advises Sleeknote CMO and co-founder Emil Kristensen. “Your content marketing strategy should include video tutorials to help users understand your product,” he says. “For example, CoSchedule has video guides to help beginners learn blogging, email management, and social media management.”

You can even integrate content marketing into your product. Ahrefs uses this strategy, explains Si Quan Ong, the company’s customer success manager. A notification within Ahrefs alerts all users — premium and freemium — to new content. This generates a lot of engagement because users know the content is going to help them use the platform to improve their marketing.

Content marketing is not just a promotional tool. It’s a 360-degree strategy that works throughout your marketing funnel to promote your product.

Images by: You X Ventures, Benjamin Dada, Carlos Muza

Update Content: How to Make Older Posts Relevant Again

June 9, 2020/0 Comments/in Tips /by Epic Presence Team

It’s easy to get hung up on creating new content. But what about all those articles you wrote years ago? Shouldn’t they get some love, too?

A lot of those pieces could probably do with some attention. Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do with those old pieces of content to bring them back to life.

Why You Need to Update Content

Like many things in the content marketing world, you need to update old content, in part, to appease Google. It’s not because Google’s come out and said publication date is a ranking factor (although it could be). It’s because the search engine typically shows the publication date in its search results. You’re not going to get many users clicking on a link that’s five years old.

Updating content can help you rank better, too, suggests blogger Pete McPherson. He has a nice strategy that blog owners can deploy to move old articles sitting on the second page of Google to the first page.

Research by Botify has even found a correlation among the amount of content changed, Google’s crawl frequency and the average ranking of content. That being said, there have been several instances in which a piece of content’s ranking decreased after it was updated, writes Google engineer Kyle Blanchette. But consider your audience, too, he says. It’s worth updating your content so they are served the most useful information you can provide.

This is a great point. Updating old content is a great way for brands to connect with readers and show them that they are serious about delivering the best experience — and that their content isn’t just there to please Google.

Finally, updating content creates easy wins. In moments of economic crisis, when marketing budgets are tight, refreshing old content is a way to boost your campaigns with minimal investments.

4 Ways to Update Your Content

There are four things you can do with old content: you can rewrite it, repurpose it, republish it or delete it. No strategy is inherently better than the others, so we recommend taking things on a case-by-case basis.

1. Rewrite It

The most common fix we see is for someone to rewrite some or all of the existing content. Sometimes, you’ll only need to change a paragraph or two. Other times, you’ll need to rewrite the whole piece. The important thing to note is that you are keeping the old post’s URL intact.

If you’ve tried to game Google with your writing in the past, updating your content now may be particularly worthwhile. Google’s algorithm has become substantially more advanced since the days of keyword stuffing, points out OptinMonster’s Jacinda Santora. Articles that are over-optimized for keywords don’t cut it in today’s SERPs.

Start the rewriting process by acting like an editor, recommends writer Jessica Greene. This means checking spelling and grammar, fixing broken links, updating images, and noting where the content needs to be improved. When it comes to rewriting the content itself, Greene advises using newly researched keywords where possible. Don’t fudge it, though. If you start to sound like a robot, leave that copy out.

Don’t be surprised if you hit a few snags during the rewrite process. As blogger Lisa Koivu points out, sometimes your own URLs may prevent you from giving your content a full refresh. This issue is particularly common with WordPress websites, where the publication date is part of the article’s URL. Change the URL, and you lose the links that pointed to the content and all of the SEO traffic that went to it.

2. Republish It

If the ideas in your old content are still relevant and useful, consider republishing it as a brand new article. This may require a bit more effort on your part, but it means you won’t be constrained by the topic or outline of your existing content.

This is the approach Kristen Poborsky has taken with a piece of content on her blog. Rather than rewrite the existing piece, she decided to create a brand new guide that goes well beyond the scope of the original. If you’re following her approach, she recommends avoiding the use of dates and any other information that may cause the article to age quickly. Doing so will make it easier to update the article in the future.

If your website does add dates to URLs, a republish is the best solution for updating content. It’s even possible to republish an article without updating it much, writes Content Marketing Institute’s Kim Moutsos. Her team has done this several times, but they always make sure to update any links and details to ensure the piece is still accurate. An editor’s note is also added to explain why it has been republished.

If that old article still earns SEO traffic, you should add an editorial note at the top of the original article with a link that points users to the new article. This will help both readers and Google know which article is the most relevant.

3. Repurpose It

Rather than updating or republishing old content, you can give it a new life by turning the information into multiple different formats. One old blog post can easily become an infographic, a tweet and a YouTube video.

It’s a great way to quickly create huge amounts of fresh content, writes Venngage’s Jeilan Devanesan. It can also help you reach a wider audience, too. When you convert written words into videos, podcasts and images, you increase the ways people can hear your message. Site traffic should increase, too, as you’ll be acquiring users from sites like YouTube and Pinterest, rather than just Google.

Repurposing content neatly avoids the duplicate content issues you need to be careful of when rewriting and republishing content, adds Hatchbuck’s Natalie Slyman. You can’t get a duplicate-content penalty from Google if you are using multiple formats to get your ideas out.

4. Delete It

Sometimes, the best thing to do with an old article is to delete it. Seriously, if it no longer serves your audience, it’s doing your brand a disservice to keep it around. That’s true even if it’s bringing in website traffic. What are those visitors going to think about your brand if your content is stale and outdated?

House cleaning is essential if you’ve been creating content for a long time, writes Yoast’s Marieke van de Rakt. You can only have a couple of articles ranking for each keyword in Google. So, if you have more than three very similar articles, you’re just competing with yourself.

Some decisions will be easy. That new feature release article you wrote five years about a feature that no longer exists? That can definitely go. A press release about that conference you attended last year? That can probably go, too.

Don’t get carried away, though. Plenty of old content can be rewritten, republished or repurposed. A lot of it probably should be used again.

Use these questions from Search Engine Journal’s Danny Goodwin to decide what’s for the chop and what’s not:

Does it get traffic?
Has the page earned links?
Does it rank highly?
Will readers miss it?

Think twice about deleting content if you answer “Yes” to any of these questions.

If you’re still happy to delete your content, there’s one last thing you need to do. Make sure you redirect the URL, social media marketer Louise Myers writes. You don’t want users to land on missing pages and get a 404 error. They won’t like it, and neither will Google.

The Beauty of Evergreen Content

Updating content is something you’re always going to have to do if you want to keep your website in order. Advice will change, your brand will change, and global crises will come and go. A good blog will maintain its relevance during and after.

One way to keep your refresh work to a minimum is to create evergreen content where possible. This is content that is always relevant, as Ahref’s Si Quan Ong explains. When you have an evergreen topic to cover, you can create one great piece of content and keep adding to it — and repromoting it — over time.

No piece of content is going to stay relevant forever. But if you pick topics that people are always interested in, avoid the use of dates, and make sure your language or angle doesn’t unnecessarily age the piece, you’ll have a lot less work to do in the future.

At Epic Presence, we don’t just specialize in helping you create fresh content. We can also help you breathe life into your old content. If you have an archive of content that’s yet to find the audience it deserves, we can help by implementing the strategies above, then performing influencer outreach to make sure your content gets seen.

Images by: Corinne Kutz, Thought Catalog, Austin Distel

4 Steps to Creating an Engaging Content Calendar in Any Vertical

May 19, 2020/0 Comments/in Tips /by Ed Currington

You’ve been putting it off for ages, haven’t you? I’ll bet even reading this article about creating a content calendar is making you sweat.

But, honestly, creating a content calendar is in your best interests. It may seem like hard work, but if you spend the time to create one now, you’ll reap the rewards in the future.

Once you have a calendar in place, it’s easier to ramp up content production. Want to start publishing two guest posts every week on top of your regular blogs? Not a problem. Need to double your content output? No problem — your content calendar has you covered.

Here’s everything you need to know about creating the kind of publishing schedules that agencies and big companies rely on.

Why a Calendar Is So Important for Your Content Team

Personal bloggers and small agencies can just about get away with not having a content calendar. Bigger companies and agencies that run campaigns for enterprise clients can’t, however.

Having that calendar takes away a lot of the daily stress that comes with creating great content, says Express Writers CEO Julia McCoy. When everything is planned in advance, including titles, keywords and publication dates, writers and editors don’t have to waste time scrabbling around for topic ideas. Instead, they can just open up their laptops, look at the content calendar and get to work.

A calendar also means everyone ends up singing from the same hymn sheet, writes Quuu COO and cofounder Matthew Spurr. “Using an editorial calendar means that everyone involved with the content creation process is fully informed about their objectives, important dates, and can see where their contribution fits into your overall content strategy.”

Ultimately, this gives your efforts the direction they need, writes Hinge’s Austin McNair. When everything is planned out in advance and everyone knows what they are doing, the work tends to get done — and done well.

Finally, a content calendar provides a big-picture view so you can make sure that any new initiatives, product releases of events get the coverage they need ahead of time.

Step 1: Create a Content Strategy

Why are you even bothering to do content marketing? I’m not being facetious. It is a serious question you need to answer before you can go any further.

Content marketing can be used to achieve a lot of business goals, from lead generation to customer service. By understanding which goals are important to you, you can start to develop a content strategy that addresses those goals. Without that goal alignment, you can’t have an editorial strategy, explains writer Nathan Thompson. It informs everything else.

Otherwise, as B2B marketer Dayana Mayfield writes, you’ll have a wealth of content but a dearth of meaningful results.

In our case, we use our client’s business goals to guide our content marketing strategy. Sometimes, clients will want to build awareness for their business or a feature of their product. Other times, they’ll have traffic or lead-generation goals in mind, and we’ll develop a strategy to achieve those.

At this point, we also consider how we can make our clients heard in an increasingly noisy online space. That means identifying very specific audiences and understanding what messages would be relevant for them.

Jodi Harris, the director of editorial content and curation at the Content Marketing Institute, recommends thinking about how you can differentiate your messages from those of your competition. “What unmet industry needs can be addressed with the content you create?” Harris writes. “What gaps exist in your current content creation efforts – or the efforts of your competitors? What industry events can you tie your content to for added exposure potential?”

Step 2: Use That Strategy to Create an Editorial Plan

You’ll need something to populate your calendar and ultimately write about. Enter content themes and topics.

“Every good editorial system is built on an organized, thoughtful foundation of categories and topics,” writes Jacob Warwick, CEO of Discover Podium. These give focus to your editorial team and ensure you are speaking directly to your target audience with a relevant message.

Categories are broad buckets that each of your topics will fall under. When creating them, think about the broad conversations the target audiences you identified in Step 1 would want to read about. Anywhere between three to six categories will be sufficient for most publishers.

Next, you’ll want to get your editorial team together and brainstorm every conceivable topic related to those categories that your target audience would want to read about. Think about their pain points, their desires and what the competition is publishing.

Make sure you consider where specific topics fit into your sales funnel, advises content strategist Maddy Osman. You’ll want to have content that reflects a broad range of intents, Osman says. This includes content for people just looking for information at the very top of the funnel down to those looking to make a purchase.

Note: At this point, you should also establish editorial guidelines for your blog or clients if you don’t already have them. This takes a bit of effort off the bat, but it makes things unbelievably easier when you’re publishing multiple pieces every week.

The more content you create, the harder it becomes to retain consistency, writes JotForm’s Chad Reid. A style guide will outline the particular writing style your content will adhere to, including things like tone, grammar and punctuation preferences. It doesn’t have to be set in stone, however. Reid and his team think of their style guide as a living document, something they are constantly adding to and editing.

Step 3: Create a Calendar and Flesh It Out

You now have everything you need to fill in your content calendar. Now, you’ve got to actually create the calendar. There are a lot of tools out there that can act as editorial calendars, but we run everything through Google Sheets. It’s cheap, everyone knows how to use it, and it works seamlessly with Google Docs, where we do all of our writing.

Even enterprise content calendars don’t need to be complex. At a minimum, however, we’d recommend creating columns for:

The topic
Who’s writing it
Related research and keywords
The due date
The date of publication

Give thought to how your team will interact with your calendar and design accordingly, writes Brian Dean at Backlinko. His team’s own calendar is designed specifically with collaboration in mind because so many people need to interact with a post before it goes live.

The clearer you can be and the more information you can provide, the better. For instance, Dean uses checkboxes so everyone can quickly see the various statuses of each article.

Step 4: Plan Ahead, But Be Ready to Roll With the Punches

Filling out your content calendar is not a one-time job. It’s something you and your editorial team will need to return to again and again.

Initially, you’ll want to fill out your calendar as far into the future as possible, advises Ben Sailer, inbound marketing director at CoSchedule. “That means allocating space for holidays, seasonal events, and other calendar items you know are going to crop up eventually.”

Going forward, you’ll want to set aside time to generate new topics, keep your calendar up-to-date and improve it where possible. Editorial meetings are great for this and can give you and your team a chance to reflect on your entire process.

Make sure you spend time discussing whether the calendar is still working for you, writes the team at Campaign Monitor. This isn’t limited to the calendar itself, although small tweaks can make it a lot more user-friendly. Reflect on whether your content is meeting the goals you outlined in Step 1 and whether changing the tone or style could improve it.

Get to Work

Follow this advice, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to create an enterprise-level content calendar.

Or don’t follow it. The truth is, while the strategy above works for us and the brands we’ve mentioned, there’s no such thing as the perfect content calendar. What works for one team may not work for another. The right content calendar for you is the one your team will use.

So, feel free to steal our ideas, but don’t be afraid to add your own flourishes, either.

Images by: Brooke Lark, Brooke Cagle, Kelly Sikkema

Any Company That Publishes Content Needs a Thoughtful, Inclusive Style Guide

May 5, 2020/1 Comment/in Tips /by Dani Ryskamp

Why does your style guide matter?

If your first response is “brand consistency,” you’re not alone. In a 2016 report, Demand Metric found that 90 percent of surveyed companies believed style guides helped promote important consistency in brand presentation.

The right style guide, however, is aware of more than your company’s individual attempts to build a brand.

All content is a contribution to a conversation. As such, it responds to the same shaping forces as any other piece of persuasive or communicative work. Genre, audience and historical context all play a role in how content is understood.

The right style guide doesn’t just keep your content team on the same page. It also helps your team contribute to an ongoing conversation in a thoughtful, inclusive and agile manner.

How Your Style Guide Shapes Your Content

Style guides start by keeping everyone on the same page — both literally and metaphorically. A style guide helps settle questions surrounding spelling, punctuation and situations in which multiple versions of a phrase may each be grammatically correct.

Lack of a style guide can cause variations that frustrate writers, editors and readers alike. For instance, SmartBug contributor Joe Gillespie began writing for SmartBug in the days before the company had instituted a style guide.

“When I started seeing terms spelled three different ways in content our agency produced, I wanted to scream,” Gillespie writes. “The problem wasn’t that my coworkers were careless, but rather, people tend to be unconsciously more focused on getting the words out of their heads and not think about what those words should look like on a screen.”

Style guides help ensure that “what those words should look like on a screen” is consistent and welcoming to audiences. By doing so, a style guide helps reduce the risk that a reader will become confused or angered by inconsistencies or inappropriate terms while consuming your organization’s content.

Diversity and Inclusion: Keeping Your Team Focused

Language changes quickly. A style guide that doesn’t account for the ways in which people from various backgrounds refer to themselves or wish to be referred to by others runs the risk of sounding hopelessly outdated. At best, this outdatedness will seem quaint; at worst, it will be offensive.

One of the best ways to ensure your style guide addresses everyone in your potential audience inclusively is to examine the ways in which various minority groups have navigated identifying language.

A number of organizations for journalists, for instance, have published guides to help content creators build style guides, articles and other works. Commonly referenced examples include the following:

The Michigan State School of Journalism offers several online guides compiled with the assistance of the communities they describe. Resources are currently available on appropriate ways to discuss Native American, Hispanic/Latino, and Muslim individuals and issues.

Some activist organizations and interest groups offer guidance, as well. For instance, Gender Spectrum hosts a guide to The Language of Gender, which focuses on gender descriptors and their uses. TEAM Up offers a one-page style supplement sheet, intended to complement use of the AP Stylebook, for anyone reporting on mental health or mental illness-related topics.

Why Focus on Inclusion?

When content consistently refers to certain groups or individuals using outdated or offensive terms, it risks alienating not only the people to whom those words refer, but also those who seek greater inclusiveness in their own interactions.

Chocolate maker Cadbury provides a visual example of how outdated thinking can offend audiences. In August 2019, the company released its Unity Bar, advertised as a celebration of Indian Independence Day. The chocolate bar contained squares of dark, mixed, milk and white chocolate.

This ended up getting roundly criticized for trivializing racism, though. “By creating a blended bar with four different shades of brown, Cadbury intended to celebrate the multi-cultural society in India,” Dr. Pragya Agarwal writes at Forbes. “Instead, they have created a product that demonstrates what tokenistic diversity looks like.”

Companies would make the same mistake in their content by failing to consider a wide range of perspectives. For instance, restricting perspectives in marketing content can lead to the use of outdated or even offensive language that alienates readers, who interpret such language as a sign that they are members of the out-group.

These mistakes are not inevitable. By including multiple perspectives in the process of creating a style guide, an organization can help ensure it avoids gaffes like Cadbury’s — in either chocolate or written form.

Tips and Resources for Thoughtful Style Guide Development

A style guide can do it all: maintain brand consistency and offer sensitive contributions to cutting-edge conversations. Creating a thoughtful, inclusive style guide needn’t be a monumental task, either.

Start With an Existing Guide

Most content producers don’t need to build a style guide from scratch. Adopting an existing style guide can help ease the transition from “no style guide” to “follow these rules.”

Commonly used style guides in content creation include the Associated Press Stylebook (often just called “AP”) and The Chicago Manual of Style (“Chicago” or “CMS”). Several academic and professional organizations have their own style manuals, as well, including the Modern Language Association (common for works in the humanities) and the American Psychological Association (often used in the sciences).

AP and Chicago are commonly used, so readers might feel an early sense of familiarity with content that follows their guidelines. When readers don’t risk being tripped by unfamiliar spellings or configurations, they can absorb content more easily.

Be Willing to Deviate When Necessary

AP is one of the most commonly used style guides, but it isn’t always at the forefront of language or cultural change.

For instance, this Conscious Style Guide piece by Henry Furhmann raised issues about hyphenated terms like “African-American” more than a year before the Associated Press decided to embrace “African American” rather than its hyphenated predecessor.

“Their use in racial and ethnic identifiers can connote an otherness, a sense that people of color are somehow not full citizens or fully American: part American, sure but also something not American,” Fuhrmann writes of the hyphen.

The Associated Press is aware of the way language changes, says Lauren Easton, the AP’s director of media relations. Since changes to the stylebook are based on a critical mass of research and expert opinions as to language use, however, they can often lag behind actual changes in the most inclusive way to refer to people, communities, issues or events.

Staying on top of language change, even when it means staying ahead of another organization’s style guide, can help an organization avoid alienating its audiences by using a term that has developed a derogatory connotation.

Set Intentions at the Start

Need help deciding when to deviate? Consider starting your style guide project with a preamble. The preamble will “articulate exactly what this content style guide is for — what we hope to achieve by creating and using it,” says Yuval Keshtcher at UXPin.

Start with a brief statement that expresses the style guide’s goals. For instance, the preamble might state that the style guide exists to “maintain consistency in brand voice and develop a sense of inclusivity and awareness of global issues within our content.”

A preamble not only helps keep the rest of the style guide project on track, but it also helps other users within an organization understand why the style guide places certain demands on expression.

Keep It in One Place

Mailchimp’s original style guide was a PDF file. Shortly after sending it to the rest of the Mailchimp team for the first time in 2015, however, creator Kate Kiefer Lee discovered that the Mailchimp style guide PDF met the same fate as many other internal PDF mailings: People received it, but they never looked at it.

The solution? Move the style guide to GitHub. This public location also allowed Mailchimp to practice the company’s value of making information accessible and transparent to others.

Today, Mailchimp’s style guide lives on a publicly accessible subdomain inside Mailchimp’s own site. It’s broken down into a number of subcategories. As a living document, the style guide is updated regularly to ensure consistency and responsiveness to changes in the multitude of conversations and genres in which Mailchimp contributes content.

Your organization’s style guide doesn’t have to live on a web page for public view. It should, however, be kept in a file or document that can be easily accessed, updated and checked for consistency. By doing so, your organization can be certain that its consistent style, tone and approach to key conversations continues to change with the times, rather than fossilizing.

5 Questions That Will Help You Adapt Your Marketing During a Pandemic

April 15, 2020/0 Comments/in Experts, Tips /by Ed Currington

It’s amazing how quickly things can change. In just a few weeks, marketing plans have gone out the window. Whole departments are now working remotely. Budgets are being squeezed tight. At the same time, businesses still need customers — some need them more than ever. That means there’s plenty of things for marketers to do, and plenty of questions to get our heads around as we try to understand marketing during a pandemic.

Here are five questions we think most marketers (ourselves included) are asking right now, and the answers we’ve been able to glean.

What Does COVID-19 Mean For Everyone’s Marketing Budget?

You’d think that marketing budgets would be one of the first things to be slashed as companies look to cut costs.

In many organizations, particularly consumer-facing brands that don’t sell essential products, that’s exactly what’s happened. In a poll of 176 marketers, Gartner found nearly two-thirds (65 percent) were expecting moderate to large budget cuts.

One anonymous direct-to-consumer media buyer told Digiday’s Kristina Monllos that their company was decreasing campaign spending by 10 percent. If things got worse, they were ready to pause entire campaigns.

But not everyone’s marketing budgets are on the chopping block. Singular’s John Koetsier reports gaming and news companies are splashing out. Ad spends from gaming companies are up 25 percent from the year’s low point. News and information companies have increased ad spend by 11 times from early January.

In the B2B sector, budgets are being shifted. Funds allocated to canceled conferences are now being spent online, writes Bernard Marr. Even those who barely have a Facebook presence will be pouring money into digital ads.

There’s even the possibility that those who continue advertising online will get more bang for their buck. ICF Next’s Nick LeRoy points out that the cost of advertising in many industries is lower than it’s been for a long time.

What’s the Right Way For Brands to Approach Marketing During a Crisis?

There’s an important distinction between appearing to profit from a crisis and simply continuing to market your business within a pandemic context. Brands will have to recognize where that dividing line is and tread carefully in the coming months.

One strategy being pursued by brands like Nike is to amplify public health messages, writes EY’s Janet Balis. Brands with agile internal departments and agency partners may be able to pivot scheduled marketing campaigns and replace messaging with something both on-brand and on-message.

Acts of kindness and charity are also effective strategies. Many banks are choosing to waive overdraft fees, for instance, while fashion brands are creating masks and gowns. Your customers will remember how you act during this period, says Marc Beckman, CEO of advertising agency DMA United. Get behind a common cause, and they’ll be much more likely to repay your efforts in the future.

Above all, brands must strike an empathetic tone. Ignoring the current pandemic in your marketing message is a surefire way to come across as tone-deaf. Yes, there’s a danger your bland coronavirus support message will get lost among the dozens of other corporate well wishes. But a vacation-themed marketing message will get your brand noticed for all the wrong reasons.

It’s why Convince & Convert’s Lauren Teague recommends brands cancel all scheduled posts. Go back and look at your editorial calendars, then assess which content is still relevant and acceptable in light of the current situation. If there’s even the slightest chance it could come across as insensitive, scrap it.

Where Does Content Marketing Fit in All of this?

Content marketing remains as important as ever. Of course, we would say that, but hear us out: Of all digital marketing strategies, content marketing remains affordable, accessible and effective for virtually every brand.

Content marketing even trumps other digital marketing tactics like PPC right now, writes content marketer Miranda Miller. If you’re struggling to serve customers right now, you’re much better off focusing on SEO and content marketing. Both are long-term strategies, which will deliver even bigger ROIs in the future if competitors fail to keep pace.

Further, people are craving content now more than ever, writes Dean Yeong. When people are panicking, your brand can stand apart by offering positivity. Content marketing is a great vehicle for this.

Content marketing is also a much softer sell than advertising, notes writer Hayley Yager. By delivering value and building trust, you shore up your position as an ethical marketer during times of crisis.

Your content doesn’t have to be about the virus (it’s actually better if your content is evergreen). But it must help your target audience solve a problem. It must also be sensitive. Write about how to work from home better or bodyweight exercise routines. Don’t talk about how to save money on your next business trip.

Best of all, help is at hand for brands who want to increase their content marketing efforts. Moz Academy is offering free SEO training for everyone. SEMrush has made its Social Media Toolkit free of charge, too, as well as its lead generation service, Oppty.

How Is User Behavior Changing Now That Half the World is in Lockdown?

Unsurprisingly, being stuck inside all day is having a pretty fundamental effect on our behavior.

For starters, people are genuinely concerned, and this is impacting their buying decisions. Research by consumer-intelligence company Suzy, presented by CEO and founder Matt Britton, found that 71 percent of Americans are very concerned about news surrounding COVID-19. More than half (54 percent) of consumers are putting off big-ticket purchases like homes and cars for the next three months.

It also seems a lot of us might not be as addicted to our phones as we think we are. WordStream’s Mark Irvine points out that paid search campaigns are showing a big drop in search traffic as a result of shelter-in-place orders. “Since Monday, March 16, mobile traffic has consistently been down an average of 24% from the last week of February,” he says. “Tablet traffic is similarly suffering from a 19% drop in the same time period.”

Most big tech platforms are experiencing the same phenomenon, Ella Koeze and Nathaniel Popper report in The New York Times. “Facebook, Netflix and YouTube have all seen user numbers on their phone apps stagnate or fall off as their websites have grown, the data from SimilarWeb and Apptopia indicates.”

The coronavirus may change the way we work in the future, too, writes Social Media Today’s Andrew Hutchinson. “Many workplace experts have already noted that the forced shift to working from home will likely alter the way businesses approach their operations, even after the pandemic,” he says.

What’s Happening on Social Media?

Social media has been an unsurprising winner in a world where everyone is confined to their homes and not allowed to socialize outside.

The New York Times’ Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel report that messaging on Facebook and Instagram has increased by more than half in a lot of countries. Italian video calls have increased by a staggering 1,000 percent.

At the same time, brand engagement across all platforms is down, according to Social Fresh CEO Jason Keath. The decline is twice as bad on Facebook and Instagram as it is on Twitter. Engagement on Instagram fell 14 percent since the start of the year while Facebook engagement fell 13.5 percent.

The lesson: It appears users care a lot more about hearing from friends and family they can’t see in person right now, and a lot less about what brands are trying to sell to them.

What’s more, some of the less savory elements of social media have re-emerged as a result of the pandemic. Misinformation, conspiracy theories and scams are rife among private groups on Facebook, Mark Scott at Politico reports. Anti-Chinese sentiments are also becoming common across the major platforms, Hanna Kozlowska at Quartz reports.

At the same time, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all sent content moderators home, Wired’s Louise Matsakis and Paris Martineau write. The task of sifting through the mire of fake and vitriolic content has been left in the hands of machines.

And they aren’t doing a good job. Content from authoritative publishers like The Atlantic and Buzzfeed are being taken down for violating spam rules, Matsakis and Martineau report.

What’s Next?

We are still in middle of all this, and parts of the new normal still seem uncertain. But hopefully, these questions provide some guidance and direction to your COVID-19 marketing strategies. Remember, wherever you’re currently working and whatever budget you’re working with, there’s still plenty you can achieve in the coming months and the year ahead.

Images by: Fusion Medical Animation, Diggity Marketing, Donn Strain

How Content Marketing Became a Weapon of Choice for the Far Right

March 3, 2020/0 Comments/in Tips /by Dani Ryskamp

Content marketing strategies were born to help companies reach customers.

Provide a steady stream of articles or videos with curiosity-piquing headlines, content-marketing wisdom said, and internet audiences will engage with them. Increased engagement prompts search engines to continue bumping the content’s source to the top of the list, reaching more audiences who can’t resist a click. The cycle repeats.

Content marketing strategies, however, tend to be content-neutral: They work regardless of whether the content in question is an innocuous attempt to sell a household item or an insidious endeavor to sell extreme ideologies.

And some sources of extreme ideologies have taken advantage of this fact. It’s why so many white nationalist and other extreme right-wing views often come packaged in the same style as “five weird tricks to eliminate cellulite!” — and why internet users need to understand clickbait tricks in order to fight back.

Clickbait, Information Addiction and the Psychology of Headlines

Clickbait is specifically designed to hook our attention and reel us in. Often, the content promised by a clickbait title is sparse in the actual article or video. Instead, we’re presented with a handful of photos or one-line quips scattered among a slew of ads.

It only takes a few rounds of clickbait ads before the average internet user can predict what a clickbait-y title has in store for them. Yet even when we know what’s in store, we often can’t resist clicking the link.

There are several reasons we fall for clickbait, says psychologist Mike Brooks, Ph.D. First, information has survival value for humans, which means that we’re drawn to sources of new information — especially when the price of access is a simple click.

“Clickbait works, in part, because the promise of compelling information activates a particular dopamine pathway,” Brooks says. “Dopamine is released and creates an itch that can only be scratched by obtaining the promised information.”

Clickbait is also appealing because it piques our curiosity. We want to know “what’s behind the curtain,” Brooks says. This desire to know is also the result of a dopamine release, which is implicated in the sense of satisfaction we get from discovering the answer.

What is the one weird trick that will save me $500 on my car insurance? How did these 15 shocking celebrity marriages end? Clicking satisfies our curiosity … until the next headline comes along.

The power of clickbait, however, persists beyond the moment we click to satisfy our itch to know. Clickbait also derives power from the psychology of headlines themselves.

How First Impressions Change Our Memories

Headlines provide our first introduction to the contents of an article. As popular wisdom holds, first impressions make a difference: They influence how we feel or think about a person or subject.

Research indicates, however, that first impressions do more than influence our feelings. They also influence what we are capable of remembering from an interaction or event.

For instance, in a 1997 study published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Gregory J. Digirolamo and Douglas L. Hintzman describe how they showed test subjects a series of five images, one at a time. All five were identical except that in each showing of the series either the first image or the fifth image was reversed. The subjects were then asked which image they’d seen more: The one reversed image or the four standard images?

As it turned out, the answer depended on when in the series subjects had seen each version of the image. If the flipped image appeared last, subjects said they saw the standard image more often. If it appeared first, however, subjects said they saw the flipped image more often — even though they had actually seen it only 20 percent of the time.

The first impression, therefore, didn’t only affect how subjects felt about the next four impressions. It also affected their memories of which images they had actually seen.

Headlines Change Our Understanding of Content

For a 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Ullrich K. H. Ecker and fellow researchers tried to test similar effects of first impressions on memory, and they did so with headlines.

In one experiment, the researchers handed subjects one of two identical articles on burglary rates in Australia. The article noted that burglary rates had declined 10 percent over the previous decade, but had experienced an anomalous 0.2-percent bump in the most recent year. The two articles, however, had diverging headlines: One claimed the number of burglaries was increasing while the other emphasized the long-term downward trend in burglaries.

Readers were asked to read the article, then take a pop quiz on its contents. In each case, the headline affected the details readers remembered: Those who read the “increasing” headline said burglaries were going up while those who read the “decreasing” headline said burglaries were going down.

Headlines Reaffirm Our Knowledge

Finally, headlines may entrench us further in our own opinions when they support what we already believe — regardless of whether our beliefs are based in fact.

For instance, a 2007 article by John R. Surber and Mark Schroeder in Contemporary Educational Psychology describes how the researchers tested reading speed and comprehension of college students who read a chapter of informative text. Students read each chapter both with and without headings to guide them through the information. About half the students had significant prior knowledge in the text’s content area, and about half did not. After reading, students were asked to take a short recall test.

Surber and Schroeder found that the headings were most helpful for readers who already had high prior content knowledge. The headings appeared to reinforce what the readers already knew. These readers also spent more time reading pages with headings than pages without.

It’s unlikely that clickbait headlines like “You Won’t Believe How Cute These 47 Raccoons Are!” reinforce known or believed information for most readers (raccoon aficionados notwithstanding). Clickbait headlines that promote extreme political or social viewpoints or that repeat conspiracy theories, however, are more likely to reaffirm what adoptees of those views already believe.

Far Right Clickbait Tactics

Because clickbait headlines take advantage of our brain’s neurotransmitter-based curiosity system, they’re a powerful draw for attention, even when we would otherwise not be interested in the content presented.

This has made clickbait a popular tactic among white nationalist, alt-right and far-right groups, who might otherwise struggle to get their ideas in front of a mass audience. Many such groups have leveraged clickbait tactics on social media to spread their ideas, leaving the platforms scrambling to keep up.

What is Truth, Anyway?

One way clickbait grabs attention is by playing fast and loose with the truth. “Clickbait isn’t a spit-shined sales pitch meant to lightly elevate the quality of your genuinely decent goods and services, it’s often a blatant lie designed to disguise the goods’ irreparable shoddiness,” reporter Luke O’Neil writes at Mediaite.

Some clickbait trades on blatantly false headline statements. These headlines often fall into the category of “fake news,” such as a 2017 clickbait headline that read “NPR: 25 Million Votes for Clinton ‘Completely Fake’ — She Lost Popular Vote.” The fake headline was accompanied by a photo of Hillary Clinton.

Why do photos matter? A second experiment by Ecker and colleagues demonstrates that when an article contains a photograph of a person who is also mentioned in the headline, our impression of that person more strongly correlates with the impression the headline seeks to create.

Ecker and colleagues tested this hypothesis by pairing photographs with headlines that mentioned either a criminal culprit or a crime victim. In half the articles, the person mentioned in the headline was also the person in the photo; in the other half, the headline mentioned the criminal while the photo was of the victim, or vice versa.

Subjects read the articles and then rated each photo on factors known to be influenced by first impressions, like attractiveness, trustworthiness and aggression. When the headline named the person in the photo, subjects were more likely to rate “criminals” negatively and “victims” highly, regardless of whether the news story itself were true.

Fake news headlines like “25 Million Votes for Clinton ‘Completely Fake’ — She Lost Popular Vote” are thus more likely to gain traction when paired with photos of the person in the headline. Readers’ impression of Clinton may be soured, even if the headline itself is false or does not accurately represent the contents of the article.

Promoting Ideas That Cannot Be Falsified

At best, clickbait headlines grab attention by making claims that aren’t falsifiable — that is, they cannot be proven true one way or another. Author and reporter David A. Tomar gives the example of a headline that claims “These are the absolute most adorable piglets you’ll ever see.”

“It’s not that you won’t see adorable piglets when you click on the link,” Tomar writes. “It’s that there’s no way of objectively proving that they are the most adorable pigs you will ever see.”

These non-falsifiable claims are popular in right-wing headlines. Breitbart News, for instance, frequently inserts subheadlines like “Leftists Rage at Jokes” (by comedian Ricky Gervais). While surely someone, somewhere has strongly disliked one of Gervais’ jokes, finding that person and verifying their credentials as a “leftist” (by whose definition?) is nearly impossible.

The truth value of clickbait headlines isn’t the point; the interest generated by them is. This feature allows extreme views to grab attention while also, when necessary, fudging the facts.

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White nationalists and other extremists have also taken advantage of clickbait’s tendency to make hyperbolic claims, as well as the now-common expectation that the article behind the headline won’t actually live up to the headline itself.

Breitbart headlines, for instance, are designed to provoke and offend. Breitbart “tends to take offensiveness as a virtue,” says George Hawley, a professor and historian of the American right. “There’s a trollish element to it.”

Many online trolls claim they attempt to offend or outrage others merely for amusement. For many far-right media personalities, however, the attempt to offend or outrage with a clickbait-y title is intended to grab interest and draw in readers or viewers.

For instance, an article in The Economist quotes far-right author and speaker Ben Shapiro’s reliance on controversy to command attention: “If I can use the methodologies of gaining eyeballs to get people to look into deeper content, then I’m going to do that,” Shapiro says.

Algorithms Love Audience Engagement

Radical right-wing messages have also gained traction thanks to the algorithms that social media use to drive their own traffic and promote content.

For instance, YouTube struggled for years with the proliferation of extreme content, as Brian Feldman at the New York Intelligencer writes. Employees at YouTube who attempted to report on the growing problem found themselves at odds with the company’s primary goal: increase viewer engagement.

Far-right content drove engagement. Viewers who clicked on one were likely to watch more, driven not only by their own curiosity but also by YouTube’s algorithms, which were designed to suggest more videos that might pique the interest of a particular video’s audience.

At one point, YouTube even sought to encourage further viewing and content generation by creating an algorithm that would reward video creators based on engagement. Videos that got more views, or were viewed for longer, would receive a payout, even if they didn’t run ads.

The project did not, however, account for the troll effect. The algorithm would have paid more for videos that got views based on outrage rather than genuine interest, potentially making YouTube even more fertile ground for far-right messaging.

“If [the algorithm] went into effect … it’s likely that someone like Alex Jones — the Infowars creator and conspiracy theorist with a huge following on the site, before YouTube booted him last August — would have suddenly become one of the highest paid YouTube stars,” Mark Bergen at Bloomberg reports.

The Social Media Echo Chamber

Why does social media presence matter so much? For one thing, we may be more likely to believe headlines we’ve seen more than once.

For a 2018 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers Gordon Pennycook, Tyrone D. Cannon and David G. Rand used actual fake news headlines gleaned from Facebook to test whether readers would respond to the fake claims as if they were accurate.

The researchers found that not only did seeing fake news headlines make readers more likely to believe the headlines, but that seeing such headlines more than once reinforced the belief — and that this effect persisted even when the statements were highly (though not entirely) implausible.

“These observations indicate that although extreme implausibility is a boundary condition of the illusory truth effect, only a small degree of potential plausibility is sufficient for repetition to increase perceived accuracy,” Pennycook, Cannon and Rand write.

Blurring the Lines

Finally, far-right clickbait has been able to worm its way into mainstream discourse by straddling the line between extremism and conversation.

For instance, in April 2019, Vice reporters Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler noted that while Twitter had largely eliminated pro-ISIS content from its site, the social media giant hadn’t done much to eliminate white supremacist content. The reason given: Twitter executives feared that targeting white supremacist content would inadvertently sweep up more mainstream Republican content in the ban, as well.

Twitter VP of Global Communications Brandon Borrman pushed back at this characterization of the company’s policies. And in fact, the task of targeting white supremacist content via algorithm may be a tall order, as The Verge’s Casey Newton explains. While the technology remains in limbo, however, white supremacists continue to find Twitter and other platforms a welcoming ground for their rhetoric.

Fighting Back: How to Avoid Taking the (Click)Bait

It’s not always easy to avoid falling for clickbait, Brooks says. Yet there are methods you can use to keep extreme clickbait content off your own social media feeds. And if you can’t help but react, you can do so in ways that don’t also increase the reach of the content.

Wield the Banhammer

Social media sites have begun cracking down on content that expresses white nationalist or other extreme views. For instance, in April 2019 Facebook announced a ban on white nationalist content after the Christchurch shooter broadcast his actions on Facebook Live, Andrew Hutchinson at Social Media Today reports.

While Facebook’s attempts may help, it’s unlikely that they will prevent every instance of far-right or white nationalist content from floating across your feed. Tools like Facebook and Twitter’s block functions, however, allow individual users to cut certain sources out of their feeds entirely.

Twitter also offers two features to help fine-tune your feed:

The Mute function allows you to stop seeing content from a particular user without blocking them entirely.
The Mute Words feature allows you to prevent tweets that contain certain words or hashtags from appearing in your feed.

While it’s not perfect — you can’t mute words contained in someone’s Twitter handle or username, for instance — the Mute Words function does filter out most tweets that contain a muted word or phrase. Muting can also be limited by time period or set to last indefinitely.

Screenshot, Don’t Share

If you simply cannot resist snarking back at a right-wing, white nationalist or otherwise extremist clickbait headline, take a screenshot of the original to post to your own social media account rather than sharing the link.

Screenshots help reduce the spread of the original content. Your followers can see what you’re responding to, but they won’t be giving traffic to the publisher unless they search out the original article themselves. They also prevent your take on the original content from being interpreted as engagement by search engines, which cannot tell the difference between a social media share of approval and one of criticism.

By thinking about how search engines and social media sites interpret your reaction to clickbait, you can circumvent the system by which white nationalist and other extreme viewpoints circulate. You can also reduce the amount of extremist clickbait on your own feeds, thus protecting your own peace of mind.

Category: Tips